1985
February 7 - The Los Angeles City Attorney's office drops the case against sysop Tom Tcimpidis for lack of evidence and in the "interests of justice". Tom Tcimpidis had previously had his system seized for the posting of a PacTel card code without the sysop's knowledge. * March 9 - Police in Cherry Hill, NJ, seize a BBS called "Hackers' Heaven" and question a group of local BBS users, soon referred to by the media as the "Cherry Hill Gang". * March 18 - Thom Henderson announces in FidoNews that the FidoNet (now in hundreds of nodes) requires some sort of formal organization to handle administration, software distribution, and oversight. This will manifest itself across the next years as the International Fidonet Association (IFNA). * April 1 - Thom Henderson takes the reins as editor of FidoNews, replacing Tom Jennings (who had requested a replacement starting with the first issue of FidoNews and who had missed a number of weeks producing the issues). * April 22 - Tom Jennings announces in FidoNews that FidoNet, now too large to be run from a centralized location, will be broken up into smaller nets to allow better communication and administration. * June 12 - FidoNet switches over from its previous node numbering system to "Regional Nets", where areas of the country (and later the world) are assigned as "regions", controlled by a "region coordinator" and controlling the nodes beneath it. This new numbering/naming system is used by Fidonet to the present day. * July 1 - Fidonet BBS Sysop Bob Hartman announces that he has recieved permission from his company to hook his FidoNet BBS to their Usenet Newsfeed, allowing the Fidonet Network to read and post on Usenet. (The process is better refined across the coming months.) His connection is called the "UN*X Gateway". * July 4 - Tim Stryker launches Galacticomm and its main product, the MajorBBS Software Package. * July 12 - The Private Sector BBS, official BBS of 2600 Magazine, is seized by law enforcement officials for "complicity in computer theft". * July 18 - The SysOp of the Private Sector BBS is formally charged with "Computer Conspiracy" by the Middlesex County Prosecutor. * July 31 - The SysOp of the Private Sector BBS is charged with "wiring of his computer as a Blue Box." * August 10 - Paul H. Levy releases "The Ultimate in WarGames Dialer Programs", Ultra-Dial version 5.1. * September 23 - The Zeta BBS in Australia joins Fidonet. Running on a TRS-80, it is the first non-IBM node to join Fidonet. * October - Three hackers from Norway (known today as Doctor No, Insane TTM and Sector9) create a Commodore 64 demo group called RAZOR 2992, which they quickly rename to RAZOR 1911, which translates to $777 in Hexadecimal. This group later becomes one of the more infamous cracking/piracy groups and BBS networks. * November 1 - QuantumLink (Q-Link), an online service for using games and programs on Commodore 64 and 128 computers, begins operation. QuantumLink eventually renames itself to America Online in 1994. * November 17 - Taran King and Knight Lightning release Issue #1 of PHRACK Magazine, what will become the longest running electronic publication in the hacker world. Initially distributed by BBSes, it eventually moves to the internet, passing through many editors along the way. Taran King is indicted in 1990 for an article published in PHRACK Issue #24. Source * Scott, Jason. The TEXTFILES.COM BBS Timeline. http://timeline.textfiles.com/1985/